War in Iran? The US Military in Aggressive Wars

Trump is apparently expanding the US military presence in the Middle East, a possible buildup to an attack on Iran. The why of this is important, since it involves nuclear capability, Israel, and quite possibly some corrupt scheme to line Trump’s pockets by either getting a payoff for stopping the attack or a payoff for executing it. All-in-all an interesting development for a President who just scammed $10B from American taxpayers for his “Board of Peace,” which itself raises interesting Constitutional questions about that whole Advise and Consent clause that requires Senate approval for treaties.

A post – or podcast episode – for another day. For now, this got me to thinking about US military leaders and how I would expect them to react if given orders to conduct offensive operations in support of an expansionist fascist regime.

We already know they will conduct offensive operations against both nation states and non-state actors given a plausible national security and moral argument, however specious (see Viet Nam and Communist expansion).

What would it take to get them on board with an openly expansionist foreign policy? To capture Greenland by force….then Cuba…Panama (the stole our canal, after all)? He’s openly spoken about invading all these countries, plus Mexico, on a “go after the cartels” pretext.

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War with Venezuela

Early this morning, the US conducted military operations in Venezuela with the objective of capturing Venezuelan President Maduro. This operation appears to have been successful in that US agents did take the President into custody, along with his wife. Trump said in a press conference that no US servicemembers were killed, though a few were injured. The extent of Venezuelan casualties, military and civilian, is unknown.

While it seems that US military forces conducted the operations, Trump administration officials have characterized this as a law enforcement operation and execution of an arrest warrant, apparently issued under a 2022 indictment, for the President, his wife, and brother. They should be arraigned on charges by Monday morning.

Whatever the purpose and justification, this is an unprovoked act of war and almost certainly illegal under US and international law.

Trump claimed this morning that the US will control Venezuela until a stable local regime can take over, but he has no soldiers on the ground and the nation remains in the hands of Maduro’s government, legitimate or not.

This is a moving target that I am watching from an international relations theory perspective. IR theories lay out thoughts on the behavior of nations and states, and I’m interested in how the Trump regime and its actions validate, or invalidate, these theories.

There is of course also an interesting domestic political thread here inasmuch as the current divide within the MAGA movement over “America First” could be widened further by this kind of intervention. One under-discussed part of the US Presidential election in 2024 is how young people (as well as some Boomers!) on both the left and right opposed Biden policy toward Israel. On the left this was due to Biden’s support for what they see as genocide in Gaza; on the right it was about “why are we spending money to protect Israel when we have troubles of our own” with a bit of antisemitism tossed in.

Trump ran on an anti-war platform in 2024 but has unilaterally initiated military operations in the Caribbean, Middle East, and Africa.

I’ll have more to say about this as things develop, and will cover the topic on Monday during the first Monday Morning Coffee live show at 10AM Eastern.